It’s a bad name in vacuum, but if it has been reasonably widely established as a term of art to mean the sort of thing we’re looking for, then it still solves the problem of having a mutually understood name to call the thing with. Now we’re just stuck with the uphill struggle of maintaining that Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, for example, is definitely not a dungeon crawler.

“Dungeon crawler” is an even worse name than “blobber,” because it’s non-specific. Lots of dungeon crawl games don’t have that distinctive presentation, including many roguelikes.

It is nice to see the style making a return, although it’s nowhere near as prevalent as it used to be. There are some advantages to it: without smooth movement, you don’t have to worry about the player passing through geometry, which speedrunners have shown us in recent years is a pervasive problem. It also makes map design a whole lot simpler, not to mention event trigger detection.

I’ve seen “dungeon crawler” show up a bit in relation to the modern games like Etrian Odyssey and Labyrinth of Refrain that seem to have settled on 90 degree corridors being a central feature of whatever they are. Seems like this site agrees, https://www.dungeoncrawlers.org/definition/

Also interesting how modern western dungeon crawler games like Might & Magic X have gone back to 90 degree corridors after the series embraced free movement in the mid-90s. Maybe the whole party blob aspect feels more awkward in free 3D, where you start thinking of your game avatar as point-like, while in the corridor map you’re always occupying one full corridor square with a specific volume and you can see several characters fitting comfortably in the squares.

Hey, welcome to Set Side B! This list is an example of why I think blobber is a terrible name, it focuses on an aspect of them, that the whole party is crowded into one spot, that isn’t the most distinctive, which is that view of the walls and corridors in front of you. Ultima Underworld is not one of the games I categorizes as of this type, because it has smooth movement and a 3D engine. The whole reason this play style was created was to in order to display 3D dungeon corridors without an engine.

Technically you could do a classic Wizardry/Bard’s Tale/Might & Magic game with a 3D engine, but that 90-degrees-turning grid-based display style is an essential part of the concept, and so I continue to search for a better name that blobber.

I thought I _had_ mentioned Dungeon Magic, but it turns out I forgot to put it in the above list! I believe I mentioned it yesterday.

We also cannot overlook Legend of Grimrock (2012), a modern tribute to these old games and Dungeon Master in particular. It retains most of the sensibilities of its forebears but hewing so close to them puts it at odds with modern expectations.

I think the confined design space of these games is interesting. Perhaps someone smarter than me will reexamine it with the perspective of 40+ years and find that it has not yet been exhausted.